Craig Celebrates Pi Day

One of the more unusual celebrations of the Craig School year was Pi Day, March 14 (3.14). For those of us who have a hard time remembering elementary school math, pi denotes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Although computers have carried the decimal digits of pi to over two billion places, Craig students worked with merely a thousand decimal digits during a week of pi activities.

The first pi task of the week was to string color-coded beads into a necklace. Each digit from 0 to 9 was assigned a particular color and the children's task was to string the correct sequence of colored beads; the integer “3” was indicated by a small bell and the decimal point indicated by a wooden bead. Each class strung between 50 and 100 beads in the correct order to create a Pi necklace. On the second day, Pi Day proper, all classes worked on a color-coded paper chain carrying pi to 1,000 places. The chain stretched all through the school hallways.

As the week progressed, students worked on a variety of activities according to their grade level and learned some interesting Pi facts such as: Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day (3/14/1879); the sequence 123456789 appears after 523 million digits; in ancient Greece, the symbol for pi denoted the number 80; Spock in a Star Trek episode outwits a computer by telling it to “compute to the last digit the value of pi”; and the ratio of the length of one side to the height of the Great Pyramid at Giza is approximately pi/2.

The culmination of Pi Week was an 8” wide cookie (“pie) for each class. Once the class measured the cookie and determined that pi really is 3.1415, the pi cookies rapidly disappeared!